Capacity Analysis and Experimental Study with Multiple Interfaces and Multiple Channels in 802.11 Mesh Networks

A key challenge in multihop wireless network is to provision for sufficient network capacity to meet user requirements. The contributions of this paper are two-fold: (a) we analyses wireless bandwidth, the ratio between the number of channels and the number of interfaces, the ratio between the number of gateways and the number of mesh routers, and the impact on the capacity of mesh backbone, and present the asymptotic upper bound of the average throughput of mesh routers (b) based on insights from capacity analysis, we built TJU MeshNet testbed and develop a multi-interface routing protocol (MIRP). We implement the proposed protocol in our testbed to demonstrate the feasibility in practice.